HyTrust Looks to Build Community Around Virtualization

A month after launching the company with a policy-based management appliance for virtualized environments, officials at HyTrust are now looking to build a community among its customers.

HyTrust May 5 announced that it is releasing a free community edition of its namesake appliance, aimed at giving SMBs a cost-effective way to get into virtualization and cloud computing. The HyTrust Appliance Community Edition, which is designed to give users a central control point for managing and monitoring virtualized environments, also is a tool that enterprises can use to get started, according to HyTrust officials.

The free community version offers the same functionality and features as HyTrust’s Enterprise Edition, but with limitations. For example, users can only have three protected hypervisor hosts.

At the same time, HyTrust is kicking off an online community designed to support its vision of a more easily managed virtualized environment, to create a repository that enables users to share information and give feedback to the company, and to help HyTrust direct its R&D efforts.

The Community Edition lets larger enterprises easily evaluate the capabilities of HyTrust’s technology, and give feedback on their findings. In turn, HyTrust will be able to speed up product development and innovations, officials said.

“The potential for the HyTrust Community is unbounded,” HyTrust CEO Eric Chiu said in a statement. “We see this not only as a terrific opportunity for HyTrust to meet currently unmet needs of the market, but also as a great way for HyTrust to harness the powers of distributed peer review.”

The Community Edition is available to members of the HyTrust Community. To join, click here.

HyTrust launched the company April 7 with the Enterprise Edition, which can be bought as a 1U appliance or as software that can run on the customer’s hardware.

HyTrust currently can manage VMware environments, though it will expand its reach to the Xen hypervisor from Citrix Systems  later in the year, he said. The company also is working on products to support infrastructures using Microsoft's Hyper-V technology.